Category Archives: Institute News and Events

Chae Man Lee is One of Gerontology Department’s First Two Postdoc Fellows

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Chae Man Lee, a 2017 graduate of the UMass Boston Gerontology PhD program, is one of the department’s first two postdoctoral fellows. He recently talked with Saadia Ahmad of the McCormack Graduate School about his experience. This article first appeared on the McCormack Speaks blog.

SA: What was your research focus as a student?

CML: My research was focused on senior transportation, older driver safety, and healthy aging data reporting for Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and New Hampshire. My doctoral dissertation entitled, “Understanding the role of driver, vehicle, environment, and policy factors in crash injury severity among older adults in the United States” investigated how individual characteristics, vehicle elements, environmental elements, and driving licensing policy were associated with level of injury severity, from no injury to fatal injury resulting from car crashes. Continue reading →

Wendy Wang is One of First Two UMass Boston Gerontology Postdocs

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Wendy Wang, a recent graduate of the UMass Boston Gerontology PhD program, is one of the department’s first two postdoctoral fellows. She recently talked with Saadia Ahmad of the McCormack Graduate School about her experience. This article first appeared on the McCormack Speaks blog.

SA: What year and program did you graduate from? What was your research focus as a student?
WW: I graduated in May 2018 from the Gerontology PhD program. My research focused on marital relations, intergenerational relations, and health in later life. For my dissertation, I examined how providing grandchild care affect grandparents’ marital quality.

SA: What is the main focus of your postdoc fellowship?
WW: I focus on two main areas. The first area is healthy aging and senior transportation. I work with Dr. Elizabeth Dugan and her research team. Our team creates Healthy Aging Data Reports that report indicators of healthy aging for every community in Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and New Hampshire. We also do research on transportation options available for older people in Massachusetts, safety of older pedestrians for MassDOT, and the Governor’s Council to Address Aging Issues in Massachusetts to improve transportation safety. Continue reading →

News Flash: UMass Boston Gerontology Makes Headlines in 2018

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By Taryn Hojlo

UMass Boston’s gerontology faculty and students produced exciting new research findings and achieved remarkable public service achievements in 2018. The news media took notice.

Associate professor Beth Dugan and her Gerontology Institute colleagues published the 2018 edition of the Massachusetts Healthy Aging Data Report in December.The comprehensive report examined a vast array of health indicators on a community-by-community basis, creating an essential resource for policymakers and local leaders to better serve Massachusetts seniors. News coverage by WBUR in Boston looked at seven key takeaways from the report. The Boston Globe dove into the healthy aging data and produced a front-page story examining the impact of depression among elders. Dugan and her team ended the year at work on a similar report profiling the health status of seniors in New Hampshire. Continue reading →

Institute Talk: A Conversation With Iora Health CEO Rushika Fernandopulle

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Iora Health Chief Executive Rushika Fernandopulle, left, and Gerontology Institute Director Len Fishman

Rushika Fernandopulle came to the United States from Sri Lanka as a young boy and later became a doctor after graduating from Harvard Medical School. He grew dissatisfied with standard systems of care, convinced alternatives that focused on primary care could work better. Fernandopulle eventually became the co-founder and chief executive of Iora Health, a Boston company building a national medical practice to do just that.

Today, Iora cares for nearly 30,000 patients at 35 practices, about 70 percent of whom are covered by Medicare. For many of its patients, IORA employs a “risk-based care” concept, accepting fixed annual payments to care for patients rather than billing for individual services. Gerontology Institute Director Len Fishman spoke with Fernandopulle recently about his ideas on improving medical care. The following is an edited version of their conversation.

Len Fishman: How did you initially become interested in pursuing a different approach to care?

Rushika Fernandopulle: I’m a primary care doctor who trained at Mass. General. I realized that the model we had for primary care was not optimal. It was fragmented and reactive. Patients weren’t getting better and they were unsatisfied with their doctors. I realized that the core of what we were doing was turning health care into a series of transactions. Document, code, bill. All the things we were trying to do to fix health care were just making the problem worse. The simple insight I had was that maybe what we need to do is start from scratch and rebuild the system from the ground up, starting with relationships and not transactions. And that required changing everything — the payment model, the process, the technology, the space. Continue reading →

Gerontology PhD Students Show Off Their Research at GSA Scientific Meeting

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Celeste Beaulieu, a second-year PhD student, presenting her poster.

By Caitlin Connelly

That’s a lot of research.

UMass Boston’s gerontology faculty and students made 50 paper and poster presentations at the Annual Scientific Meeting of the Gerontological Society of America (GSA) held recently in Boston. The Gerontology Institute Blog asked students about their experiences as presenters at the important national conference.

Advice from PhD candidate Sae Hwang Han: Do the best science you can.

Sae Hwang Han, a PhD candidate at UMass Boston, already had a handful of presentations under his belt. This year, he presented at the poster sessions and also gave a talk at a symposium.

He found there were advantages to both poster and paper presentations. With the poster, he found, “you actually get to talk to people a lot, they ask good questions and you learn from the interactions.” Continue reading →

UMass Boston Shows Progress in Audit of Age-Friendly University Initiative

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By Taryn Hojlo

The first audit of the UMass Boston age-friendly university initiative shows the campus is making progress embracing its pledge to become more inviting to older students, staff, faculty and other members of the community. The audit, led by gerontology professor Nina Silverstein, reviewed the university’s age-friendly strengths as well as areas in need of additional attention. The volunteer research team included representatives from across campus departments and constituencies.

“Beyond simply endorsing principles, we needed to understand what age-friendliness means for our campus and what steps need to be taken to achieve it,” said Silverstein. “The audit is a step in the right direction.” Continue reading →

UMass Boston’s Lillian Glickman Honored with MCOA Lifetime Achievement Award

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Lillian GlickmanLillian Glickman has been honored by the Massachusetts Councils on Aging with its Lifetime Achievement Award for more than 50 years of experience in gerontology and work with the Massachusetts aging network.

Glickman, co-director of the Management of Aging Services Masters and Certificate Programs at UMass Boston’s McCormack Graduate School, received the award at the MCOA’s annual meeting.

MCOA Executive Director David Stevens warmly recalled working in close partnership with Ms. Glickman for several years. “I consider Lillian my mentor, a tireless advocate who, for all of her accomplishments, deserves the same respect, admiration, and recognition as legendary elder advocates Frank Manning and Elsie Frank,” he said. Continue reading →

Assistant Professor Jeffrey Stokes Joins UMass Boston Gerontology Faculty

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By Martin Hansen-Verma

Jeffrey Stokes, a quantitative sociologist who specializes in aging, families and health, has joined the UMass Boston Gerontology faculty as an assistant professor.

Stokes, who earned his PhD in sociology from Boston College, most recently served as an assistant professor of sociology at Illinois State University.

Stokes’s research program focuses on the ramifications of intergenerational, marital and social relationships for adults’ well-being in mid- and later-life. His work has been published in journals such as The Gerontologist, Social Psychology Quarterly, Aging & Mental Health, Journal of Social and Personal Relationships, Research on Aging, and Journal of Applied Gerontology.

When talking about the fundamental interests and principles that animate his work, Stokes refers to his favorite book, David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest.

“It gets to the core of much of what my research is about, examining the impacts of social ties and loneliness in a crowd,” he says. “Loneliness and isolation are different things. Especially in a technology-driven world, loneliness can be pervasive, even in a group. It’s one of the best examples of literature serving the function of social science. Continue reading →

Institute Talk: A Conversation with Benchmark Senior Living Founder Tom Grape

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The Branches in North Attleboro

The Branches, an assisted living community in North Attleboro, offers “companion-living” accommodations exclusively.

 

Assisted living has been an extraordinary successful model for combining housing and personal care. But the cost often puts assisted living out of the reach of many middle- and almost all lower-income elders and their families. Benchmark Senior Living, a leading provider of senior living services in the Northeast, recently opened a new community in North Attleboro, Mass., that found a way to lower costs by rethinking space and the way residents live.

Gerontology Institute Director Len Fishman recently met with Tom Grape, the founder and chief executive of Benchmark Senior Living, to talk about the economics of assisted living, the ideas behind The Branches community in North Attleboro and other issues that affect the cost of senior living services. This is an edited transcript of their conversation.

Len Fishman


Len Fishman: There are a lot of variables in calculating the cost of assisted living, from the size and type of accommodations to the services required for residents. But, roughly speaking,  what does it cost to reside at a Benchmark community today?

 

 Tom Grape: Compared to other alternatives, assisted living remains far more affordable unless you’re going to qualify for Medicaid. In Massachusetts, market-rate assisted living can range from a studio apartment starting at $2,500 to $3,000 a month, including typically three meals a day, housekeeping, laundry, transportation, activities, and some modest amount of personal care. And then a studio might be $3500 a month at the higher end with that same basic level of services. A one bedroom might range from $3000 to $4000 roughly, and then a two bedroom might go from $4000 to $6000. Those are starting points. Continue reading →

Pension Action Center Names Anna-Marie Tabor New Director

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Anna-Marie Tabor, a distinguished attorney with a career dedicated to consumer protection and civil rights, has been selected as the new director of the Pension Action Center at the University of Massachusetts Boston.

Tabor is the Deputy Fair Lending Director for Supervision at the U.S. Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. She will leave the federal government in July to lead the center, part of the McCormack Graduate School’s Gerontology Institute. Tabor will succeed long-time director Jeanne Medeiros, who is retiring.

The Pension Action Center (PAC) provides free legal assistance to low- and moderate-income workers, retirees and their survivors in the six New England states and Illinois whose pension benefits have been wrongfully denied. Since its creation in 1994, the center has recovered more than $58 million in pension benefits owed to its clients. Continue reading →